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Tag Archives: Abortion

Even If a Fetus Is a Person (It’s Not), a Woman Still Has Rights

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A fertilized egg isn’t yet a person, despite beliefs, mainly religious, to the contrary. But what if we assume that it is? What would that mean with regard to a pregnant woman’s rights? Alec Walen is a philosophy professor with a law degree. He explains:

The discussion in the media in the wake of the leaked draft opinion making it plain that Roe v. Wade will fall has focused on the impact the decision will have on women who will lose the right to abortion in many states, the potential political impact of the decision, and what other rights may fall next. What’s missing is a discussion of the legal implications of taking the view of the fetus that was upheld in Justice Alito’s draft, that it is an “unborn human being,” i.e., a person.

Saying that fetal personhood is inconsistent with a right to abortion opens up deep moral tensions in the law. These tensions can be resolved in one of three ways. The right way to resolve these tensions is also something that we, as a society, need to examine.

The tensions result from an observation made by [the philosopher] Judith Jarvis Thomson in 1971: if a woman is forced to carry a fetus to term—forced by threat of prosecution, either of abortion providers or perhaps of her—then she is forced to serve as the unwilling life support system for this other person. The problem is that the freedom not to have to serve others is a fundamental principle in our law.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution holds that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” As Justice Hughes explained in 1911, in Bailey v. Alabama, “The plain intention [of the Thirteenth Amendment] was to… make labor free, by prohibiting that control by which the personal service of one man is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.”

Forcing a woman to serve as the life support system for a fetus for up to nine months, when she does not want to do so, flatly runs up against this fundamental principle. The question is: are there other exceptions, other than that listed in the Thirteenth Amendment itself—as punishment for a crime—that can be defended.

Option 1: Revise two basic limits regarding service.

First limit: on specific performance.

One argument that is sometimes made on behalf of requiring women to carry a fetus to term is that parents have a general duty to care for their children. We require fathers to provide child support after a child is born even if the father would have wanted the pregnancy aborted or the child given up for adoption. If we can require fathers to care for children financially, then we can require women to carry them to term before choosing whether to raise them or give them up for adoption.

But there is a long-standing distinction in the law between requiring monetary payments, when the person has the means to make them, and providing specific performance. Child support payments are tied to the income of the father or, more broadly, the non-custodial parent. A father can be required to work to provide financial support for his children, but he cannot be forced to do some specific task. This is quite different from forcing a woman to carry a child in her body. The degrees of freedom left to fathers, to find a job that suits them, are qualitatively different from the specific, often dangerous performance of the “job” of carrying an unwanted fetus to term.

One might respond that specific performance is required of parents: they have to feed their children and take them to the doctor when they are sick. Failure to do these things can lead to charges as severe as murder if the child dies.

The problem with this response is that these specific, positive duties are contingent on being a custodial parent. At least in our society—and in the vision of Justice Barrett—parents should be free to choose whether to be custodial parents or not. If they give them up for adoption, then they lose all duties of care; if they choose not to play a custodial role but the other parent retains a custodial role, then they are responsible only for financial support. In other words, while it is true that parents can find themselves with duties of specific performance, that is only if they have chosen those duties.

Are we willing, then, to overturn the general ban on unchosen duties of specific performance?

Second limit: intrusions on bodily integrity

Bodily integrity is deeply important in the law. As Justice Cardozo wrote in 1914 . . . in the case called Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital, “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”

But a woman forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy has to endure an unwanted physical intrusion in her body. To equate the service required of a woman who carries an unwanted child to that of a father who has to pay child support within his means overlooks not only the specific performance dimension, but the fact that an unwanted fetus constitutes a bodily intrusion.

If we wanted a better analog to pregnancy, it would be giving up a kidney—a serious intrusion into the body, with small but serious health risks involved. We do not now require fathers to give up a kidney to save a child who might need one.

Are we willing to require fathers to put their bodies on the line in the same way as mothers?

 Option 2: Revision of the equality of the sexes

If we are not willing to make the two revisions just mentioned, there is another way to resolve the tensions raised by recognizing fetuses as persons and concluding that pregnant women may not choose to abort them: abandon the assumption that women have the same rights as men. We could say again, as once was clearly said, that women are not equal citizens. If they become pregnant, they have to serve the interests of the fetus they carry whether they want to or not. They have to carry burdens that fathers would never be asked to carry for their children.

One who finds this appealing might say: yes, and men have their own burdens to carry. God, they might say, made men and women different; men are built to fight and protect the home, women are built to bear and nurture children. This is the natural order of things.

This is a view that many find appealing. But it is a view greatly at odds with our modern, liberal, egalitarian conception of the law. It is a view closer to that of Gilead, the fictional dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale than our current legal order.

Are we willing to cast aside our modern, liberal-egalitarian order for some variation on Gilead?

Option 3: Recognize the right to abort fetal persons

If we are unwilling to take options 1 or 2, the third option is to maintain the right to abortion.

Adopting this third option does not mean adopting the Roe framework, with its focus on fetal viability. It might allow the state to recognize the value of fetal life by, for example, giving women a limited time to decide whether they want to carry a fetus to term. If a woman discovers that she is pregnant and does not decide to abort within that window, then she has effectively chosen to bear a duty of specific performance. She thereby presumptively waives her right not to carry it to term.

This too would need further refinement, as unforeseen conditions might arise that should revive her right to abort. For example, she might discover that she suffers a medical condition that makes carrying the fetus to term vastly more difficult and dangerous than she expected. These details, too, should be part of our conversation.

But the bottom line is this: if we are unwilling to take option 1 or 2, some basic right to abortion should be retained even if we assume that fetuses are persons.

Unquote.

Judith Jarvis Thompson’s classic essay, “A Defense of Abortion” is available here.

More on the 9th Amendment and Why It Matters

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After stumbling across the 9th Amendment a couple days ago and concluding that it’s been unjustly ignored by the Supreme Court, I wanted to see if it’s gotten much attention in all the discussion of the unofficial opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. A Google search for “News” about “9th Amendment” only turned up a few items, mostly earlier in the year.

The first was by a New York University law professor in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times:

The right to abortion is what’s known as an “unenumerated” right, meaning that it has constitutional stature even though no text in the Constitution — short of the abstract “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment — protects it. The idea of such unwritten rights may seem puzzling, but it’s well-established in our constitutional system.

The 9th Amendment explicitly acknowledges their existence, stating that the “enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” And the Supreme Court has held that the right to travel across state lines and the right to vote (among many, many others) are constitutional rights even though they’re not specified in the text. So the question is not whether unwritten rights will be recognized, but which. And that of course requires the court to tell us how it will distinguish what’s in from what’s out.

[Justice Alito’s] Dobbs draft opinion takes a remarkably stingy approach to that question. It relies on the 1997 case of Washington vs. Glucksberg, which held that the Constitution did not protect the right to physician-assisted suicide. That opinion said that unwritten rights would be recognized only if they were “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition”. . . This approach effectively freezes an 18th- or 19th-century understanding of rights in place. The draft opinion’s application of this test doomed the right to abortion.

This approach is bizarre because it ignores the changes more recent cases have made to the Glucksberg test. Most prominently, the Obergefell case in 2015 not only made marriage equality the law of the land, but also transformed the role of tradition in discerning unwritten rights. The court rejected the idea that the rights inquiry could be “reduced to any formula.” It instead embraced an approach that “respects our history and learns from it without allowing the past alone to rule the present.” This shift allowed the justices to recognize same-sex marriage as a fundamental right. . . . Obergefell’s innovation was that it struck the chains of history from the inquiry of which unwritten rights would be recognized. . . .

The Constitution will gradually lose the support of the nation it governs if the court binds its interpretation of unenumerated rights, or its interpretation of abstract provisions like “liberty,” so closely to the past. The draft opinion is not just an assault on abortion, or on same-sex marriage, or on contraception. It’s an assault on the future of the Constitution.

I’d say Alito’s opinion is also bizarre because it ignores the clear meaning of the 9th Amendment. But he’s had lots of company.

A March article at the FindLaw site asks “Why Should We Care About the Ninth Amendment?” It explains why James Madison wrote the 9th Amendment and says it’s “seemingly so powerful”, but doesn’t really explain why it became one of the Constitution’s “most overlooked provisions”, the “redheaded stepchild of the Bill of Rights”:

The Supreme Court has largely ignored this amendment in all of its extensive jurisprudence. In more than two centuries of precedent, the court has yet to use the Ninth Amendment as the sole basis for a ruling.

In Roe v. Wade, which dealt with rights not mentioned in the Constitution, the 9th Amendment was referred to but downplayed in favor of the 14th Amendment. From the majority opinion:

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether to terminate her pregnancy.

My guess is that the main reason the Supreme Court has almost always ignored the 9th Amendment is the Court’s conservatism. Why recognize that the common people have a right if some previous judge hasn’t already said so? We don’t want the citizenry running wild, exercising their rights all over the place. This disheartening article at Vox, “The Case Against the Supreme Court”, offers lots of evidence for this conclusion:

While the present Court is unusually conservative, the judiciary as an institution has an inherent conservative bias. . . .  For nearly all of its history, it’s been a reactionary institution, a political one that serves the interests of the already powerful at the expense of the most vulnerable. And it currently appears to be reverting to that historic mean.

Finally, it was surprising to learn that the biggest proponent of the 9th Amendment in recent history has been Joe Biden. In 1987, Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He asked Robert Bork about the 9th Amendment. According to this interesting article at Politico (which has much more about the amendment), Biden’s question eventually led to Bork’s Supreme Court nomination being rejected:

Soon after the committee reconvened from its first recess, Biden pressed Bork on his criticism of the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold [the contraception case]. Biden expressed his concern that Bork’s rejection of the court’s conclusion that the Constitution contained a general right to privacy — either in the penumbra created by the Bill of Rights . . . or in the Ninth Amendment — would imperil all of the Court’s subsequent decisions that relied on the precedent from Griswold. “It seems to me if you can’t find a rationale for the decision of the Griswold case, then all the succeeding cases are up for grabs,” said Biden.

Bork shifted uncomfortably in his seat before firing back at Biden. . . . â€śI have never tried to find a rationale, and I haven’t been offered one,” Bork said dismissively . . .

From his perch behind the committee table, Biden allowed a smile to spread across his face. He had successfully set the trap. Now he just had to wait for Bork to walk into it.

Two years ago, Biden said this at a Democratic candidates debate:

The only reason women have the right to choose is because it’s determined that there are unenumerated rights coming from the Ninth Amendment in the Constitution.

Then, in early February, President Biden told the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he wanted a Supreme Court candidate with a judicial philosophy “that suggests that there are unenumerated rights in the Constitution, and all the amendments mean something, including the Ninth Amendment”.

This week, after Alito’s opinion was leaked, Biden issued this warning:

One of the issues this court, many members of the court, have not acknowledged is there is a right to privacy in the Constitution. If this decision holds, it really is a radical decision. All of the decisions made in private life, who you marry, whether you can have an abortion, how you raise your child… it is a fundamental shift.”

The president went on to say that “one of the reasons” why he voted against “a number of members of the Court” was because “they refuse to acknowledge that there’s a 9th Amendment.”

Common sense says we have lots of rights not mentioned in the Bill of Rights, just like the 9th Amendment says, despite what some judges and law professors say, and that, as society changes, rights can evolve and take on more importance. The internet, for instance, makes the right of privacy even more important than it used to be. After women’s rights became a key issue in the 60s and 70s, five Republican justices and two Democrats realized that laws banning abortion were outmoded.

The Find Law article cited above concludes:

We can perhaps hope that [Biden’s recent] remarks [concerning the 9th Amendment] will be a rallying cry for the nation’s legal minds to think twice about it—or, at the very least, remember that it exists. 

Remember the 9th Amendment: The Legal Basis for Roe v. Wade

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The first ten amendments to the US Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights. We’ve all heard of the 1st amendment (free speech, separation of church and state, etc.), the 2nd amendment (we can own muskets in case the British come back) and the 5th (what you can “take” when they ask you an embarrassing question). But hardly anyone knows about the 9th amendment. We should though, because this is what it says:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This amendment made obvious sense, since it would have been impossible for the authors of the Constitution to list every right people have (e.g. the right to brush your teeth, the right to hold stupid opinions, the right not to watch college basketball in March). And some obvious rights are hardly worth mentioning, like the right to make important decisions for yourself or the right to privacy in the conduct of your daily affairs.

Yet certain members of the Supreme Court, all of whom went to law school, are forgetting about this particular amendment (even though it’s been around since 1789).

I have no legal training. I haven’t read the 1973 opinion in Roe v. Wade or the 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the two principal cases in which the Supreme Court decided that women should usually be able to end their pregnancies. I haven’t read this week’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health either. That’s the opinion that will overturn Roe and Casey if it becomes official. It’s also the opinion that would theoretically allow a future Congress to make abortion illegal in the whole country.

Yet most people would agree that if a woman can find a doctor who’s willing and able to perform a recognized medical procedure and the woman has the necessary health insurance or can afford to get it done, whether or not she has the procedure is nobody else’s business. Whether that’s because all of us have a right to privacy, a right to make important decisions for ourselves or a right to control our own bodies doesn’t make any difference. None of this should be controversial.

The five most reactionary Catholics on the Supreme Court apparently think it is. They don’t see any mention of abortion in the Constitution. They don’t see any specific reference to personal privacy. On that basis, they think it’s fine for the government to interfere with a woman’s decision to end her pregnancy.

But I’m wondering why the hell a woman shouldn’t be allowed to end a pregnancy if she wants to.

The only reasonable basis for controversy is that fertilized eggs often turn into fetuses and fetuses often turn into babies. It’s “often”, because maybe two-thirds of fertilized eggs don’t result in a birth (one study says it’s more like 50%, but it’s still a significant percentage). That’s not because of abortions; it’s because of the vagaries of human physiology. Pregnancy is a complex process and things often go wrong.

But assuming all goes well, pregnancy usually lasts around 40 weeks (the normal range being between 37 and 42 weeks). There is no point at which a fetus officially becomes a “baby”; doctors call it a “fetus” until it’s born. But doctors typically consider 24 weeks to be the point of potential viability, when an infant can theoretically survive outside the womb. Sadly, for “extreme pre-term” infants, survival isn’t guaranteed at all.

There was no way in 1973 for the Supreme Court to set an exact limit on when abortions are allowed. The only question was where to put the rough limit. They didn’t want to make it too soon or too late. Too soon would interfere with a woman’s right not to become a mother. Too late would interfere with an imminent birth. So the majority on the Court decided that women have a right to end their pregnancy until the fetus can survive outside the womb. Medical science said that this “potential viability” occurs after 24 to 28 weeks of pregnancy.

The Los Angeles Times quotes a law professor who points out that when Roe v. Wade was decided, “there was no Republican-Democrat divide on abortion. In a poll taken shortly before [the decision], 68% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats said the decision to have an abortion should be made by a woman and her physician” (the Democratic percentage was probably lower because Catholics tended to be Democrats back then).

So, after Roe v. Wade, states made laws allowing abortions before viability; some more conservative states specified 20 weeks. Today, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “abortions at or after 21 weeks are uncommon, and represent [only] 1% of all abortions in the US”. According to US News, 94% of abortions are performed at or before 13 weeks.

Unfortunately, Roe v. Wade was the catalyst for the Christian Right to get involved in politics. They got organized and argued that a fetus has a right to be born, even if it’s a day old. They have the right to hold that opinion (see the 9th amendment). The issue is whether that opinion should be made into law. If they really think all fetuses are people and all abortions are murder, all abortions should be illegal. Whether the woman was raped shouldn’t be an exception. Whether she was made pregnant by her brother or father shouldn’t be. Not even the mother’s life should be an exception, since, given the choice between saving the life of a mother and her baby, most of us would want the baby to survive.

If you take the 9th amendment seriously, however, we all have rights not mentioned in the Constitution. Among those rights are the right to privacy as we go about our lives, the right to control our bodies and what’s inside them, and the right to make our own decisions. Rights do conflict, but there’s no doubt that we should be free from government interference most of the time. Getting pregnant is a normal part of women’s lives. Deciding not to be pregnant is also normal. Seeking and receiving the kind of care modern medicine can provide is normal as well. The government should try not to interfere in such cases. The five most reactionary members of the Supreme Court — all of whom claim to love freedom — should understand that and leave Roe v. Wade alone.

It’s Been Coming. It’s Why Elections Truly Matter

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Two Washington Post columnists react. First, Monica Hesse:

This is for the girl right now hiding in the bathroom stall with two pink lines on a pregnancy test and the rest of her life in front of her.

On Monday evening, Politico published a leaked document that seemed to signal that the Supreme Court may soon overturn Roe v. Wade. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a draft opinion that would end federal protection of abortion access. The official decision won’t be announced until later this summer, and meanwhile, it’s time to think of the girl in the bathroom stall and everyone else who has been or ever will be in her position, and of everyone who put her there.

. . . Conservative voters elected conservative politicians who appointed conservative judges. A machine decades in the making, . . . a decision that cleanly establishes a divide in America: men, who will have control over the most intimate parts of their bodies, and women, who will have control over their bodies only in some states, at the whim of some legislators.

“A right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito wrote in the draft opinion. He makes no mention of the things that are rooted in the nation’s history and traditions: slavery, disenfranchisement, discrimination. . . .Bodily autonomy should not be granted to women because of history and traditions; it should be recognized because of their innate dignity as human beings. . . .

There were always abortions, after all. They happened with Mason jars, and they happened with knitting needles, and they happened in bedrooms, and they happened without painkillers, and they happened with women squeezing one another’s hands so tightly their knuckles were white, and they happened, and they happened, and they happened. The overturning of Roe would not mean the end of abortions. It would just mean the end, in certain states, of safe, legal abortions.

Alito’s opinion is barbarous and cruel. It is broad where it could have been narrow. It is scathing where it could have been compassionate. It is, as discussions about abortion often are, so preoccupied with scrambling for the moral high ground that it pays no attention to the women being trampled underfoot.

This is for the girl right now hiding in the bathroom stall with two pink lines on a pregnancy test. The girl who is going to find a way to not be pregnant anyway, no matter what the Supreme Court ends up saying in June. . . . 

Next, Paul Waldman:

. . .  Many have noted that this decision [assuming it holds] will be extremely unpopular; polls show that between 60 and 65 percent of Americans say Roe should remain. The draconian laws Republicans are already proposing at the state level could be even more unpopular.

But if those facts allowed [anybody to think] this day would not come, they were clearly misguided. The coming nightmare for reproductive rights is in large part a product of minority rule. It’s what Republicans have painstakingly constructed over the course of decades, and it might take just as long to dismantle it — if Democrats can do that at all.

Opinions on abortion have been remarkably resistant to change for the past 50 years. The antiabortion movement’s attempt to convince the public that abortion is murder was a failure, and that likely won’t change in the post-Roe world.

Conservatives know that perfectly well. But the whole point of building the apparatus of minority rule was for moments like this. To do popular things, you don’t have to twist the system in knots and eliminate democratic accountability. You do it to stop popular things you don’t like, enable yourself to do things the public doesn’t want, and hold on to power no matter what.

The details should be familiar by now. The Senate gives two votes to every state, so 40 million Americans in California, most of them Democrats, get the same representation as 580,000 Americans in Wyoming, most of them Republicans. That is then levered into the electoral college, which is why the past two Republican presidents took office despite having lost the popular vote.

That (plus unprecedented ruthlessness in refusing to allow a Democratic president to fill an open seat) gets you a conservative Supreme Court supermajority — appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, confirmed by GOP senators who represent a national minority — enacting a conservative legal revolution the public never asked for.

That court then validates nearly every effort by state Republicans to insulate their own power through voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. That will enable them to outlaw abortion over the objections of their own state populations, knowing that district lines have been drawn in a way that predetermines the outcome of elections.

It’s a closed loop, an interlocking system that insulates Republicans from accountability.

There are times when Democrats can overcome it, for example by electing governors in swing states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina. But because it’s almost impossible for Republicans to lose their hold on state legislatures, they can hamstring and undermine the governor much as congressional Republicans . . . will to President Biden if they take control of Congress in this fall’s elections.

Now consider where they’re going now that Roe is apparently dead. Forget about 15-week bans and six-week bans; a couple dozen Republican-run states will probably outlaw abortion entirely, perhaps with a grudging exception to save the life of the pregnant woman . . . 

But even that will not be enough. GOP state legislators are working to ban abortion in other states; in Missouri, one Republican state legislator has introduced a bill to allow anyone to sue over an abortion that occurred anywhere if “sexual intercourse occurred within this state and the child may have been conceived by that act of intercourse”. . . .

And it isn’t just abortions. In the antiabortion movement, most forms of birth control — including birth control pills, Plan B and even IUDs — are widely and wrongly considered “abortifacients,” the moral equivalent of abortion. Once laws outlawing abortion are passed, this is where the movement will likely turn its attention — and Republican legislators who worry only about primary challenges from the right will face pressure to go after birth control.

Meanwhile, the next time Republicans have complete control in D.C., they’ll push for a nationwide ban on abortion. The planning is already underway.

If your response is to say, “That would never happen — it would be too unpopular,” remember, that’s exactly what some said about overturning Roe. The whole point of minority rule is that you don’t have to worry about what’s unpopular.

Part of the sinister genius of minority rule is that if it is constructed with enough care and comprehensiveness, it can be demoralizing to the majority, which sees no way around it, at least in the short term. . . .

Overcoming that demoralization will require a psychological fortitude on the part of Democrats, and a commitment to do what Republicans did: to work not just for the next election but for a project that will unfold over decades. Even if you don’t get what you want from one president or one Congress, you have to take small steps until you reach your ultimate goal, knowing victory is never assured and will be a long time in coming.

That’s what the people who wanted to outlaw abortion committed themselves to, and now their victory is here. It can be reversed, but it will not be easy. . . .

Unquote.

Americans, mainly women, fought for years to make abortion legal so women would have more control over their bodies and thus their lives. The court decisions talk a lot about whether there’s a right to privacy, but it’s always been a contest between individual freedom and religious dogma. Here in America, unlike most places, freedom is losing:

The story of abortion rights in the 21st century can be seen in two world-shaking developments this past week [this is from the New York Times in September].

In the first, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively upheld drastic new abortion restrictions in Texas. A few days later, Mexico’s high court paved the way for nationwide legalization.

It may be tempting to see Mexico’s ruling as the more surprising, catapulting the world’s second most populous Catholic country on a deeply contentious social matter.

But experts say it is the United States that stands out. Since 2000, 31 countries, many just as pious as Mexico, have expanded access to abortion. Only three have rolled it back: Nicaragua, Poland and the United States.

Elections matter.

Maybe We’ll Reach a Tipping Point

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The Republican majority on the Supreme Court (three of whom were appointed by the worst president of modern times) decided that the Occupational Health and Safety Administration didn’t have the authority to impose a vaccine/testing mandate on employees at large companies because people who don’t work at large companies also get Covid-19. (People also die from carbon monoxide poisoning when they’re not at work, so OSHA probably shouldn’t protect employees from that either).

Later, the Supreme Court majority let stand a law in Texas that gives anybody in the state the right to sue someone who receives or administers an abortion after the woman has been pregnant for six weeks, contrary to previous Supreme Court decisions. Other states with Republican legislatures immediately began enacting similar laws. There’s now a strong possibility that the Republican majority will overturn the Roe v. Wade decision this year, allowing states to make abortion illegal again.

A three-judge appeals court ruled that Georgia’s new congressional map was a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act. Two of the judges who said the map was illegal were Republicans appointed by the same worst president, yet the Supreme Court majority allowed the map to stay in effect through the upcoming elections.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a mob of truck drivers decided to block the streets of the nation’s capital, causing the city’s mayor to declare an emergency. Another group, for the most part not driving big trucks, decided to block bridges between Canada and the US, disrupting trade and travel in both countries, in particular, the delivery of goods by both Canadian and American truck drivers. Yet right-wing figures in the US are supporting the Canadian blockades and discussing similar actions in the US.

If the Supreme Court majority overturns Roe v. Wade, if trade and travel are further disrupted by right-wing agitators, maybe there will be a tipping point. A majority of voters will understand that Republican politicians do not have their interests in mind and will vote accordingly.

(I forgot to mention the movement among right-wingers across the country to ban certain books and to eliminate history lessons that make white kids “uncomfortable”. It’s another example of Republicans going too far.)

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